Abstract

The past decade has seen an exponential growth of postsecondary entrepreneurship programs. This article focuses on curriculum and training materials as they enable an analysis of the nuanced ways in which entrepreneurship and “the enterprising” are conceptualized, and how texts inform future entrepreneurs to embody the language of entrepreneurship. I situate this article within the fields of sociology, entrepreneurship education, and geography and bring a spatial analysis of race, gender, and class to a normally non-spatial area of study. Although the enterprising discourse is perceived as race, gender, and class neutral, the management and self-discipline required serve to legitimize a White, male, liberal, able-bodied subject. Whiteness is also upheld through the privileging of abstract thinking, mobility, and the mapping of Other space. Meanwhile, entrepreneurship defined as the art of exploiting opportunities and as a creative destruction of space presents a very linear understanding of place, space, and community, dehistoricizing and decontextualizing entrepreneurship; and perpetuating a colonial, imperialist view of entrepreneurship which serves to uphold a universal, unmarked, white subject. This critique aims to allow for an understanding of the complexity of entrepreneurship, space, community, and subjectivity.